


Dolls, Blood, & Ink

by MelodiousPoison



Category: Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Mind Control, Multi, Other, Possession, Psychological Horror, Soulmates, more tags will be added over time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 06:22:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14099175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelodiousPoison/pseuds/MelodiousPoison
Summary: Soulmates, ripe with living colour right on your skin, painting you the closer your souls matched together until all there was left was we, not you or them. Soulmates, found within minutes, gone in seconds if you weren’t prepared to protect them or find someone who would.- They weren't always Will Graham





	Dolls, Blood, & Ink

The world had shifted when people became powered, granted gifts and curses that changed the fabric of society forever but not in ways one would expect. The fabric of what it meant to be human, what it meant to live in a world shaped in powers that could not be granted or in often cases entirely controlled. Reversion to the old adage, the survival of the fittest brought society down to its knees. Even when the world settled into a new equilibrium, the power shifting from those who could hold it with fisted hands. It was bloody, it was devastating, but it also brought something from the depths of our genetics.

 

Soulmates. Embedded deep within, you matched somebody out there and it was all revealed on your skin. The story of you and them becoming entwined, becoming something that could not be separated, no matter how deeply you cut. Each step you each took to become closer, to finding them, connecting with them brought a new iteration to the creation of becoming. One tattoo becomes many, each different yet interconnected, the story of your soul becoming built for someone else, live art across your flesh. Its significance was not for the world gone mad, but it was for the ‘we’, we belong together, we are each other, no one can take that away. Even with the world settled, death was inevitable, living, forever an insecure currency. What did the world care if you passed on - with a bloodied song or a gentle call? Everyone one carries on living even if you didn’t have the decency to. Soulmates guaranteed little but having someone at your coffin side when you were lucky enough to be buried in a decent plot of land that hasn’t been completely ravaged.

Everyone was born with clear skin, defects were eliminated from the moment of conception. At least at a superficial level. Your genetics purged and rewritten, and then you were born, and survival means something. You were good enough to begin the battle to live.They had always felt defective, their younger years taunted with the curse of empathy to the point he could be anyone if they held the inclination too. Even still, his skin remains untouched, smooth to the touch and some would envy than pity. No soulmate. They will be alone in this world, they would whisper, their bodies changing. Everyone changing an inevitability, but they themselves couldn’t, not in the ways that mattered. It became more literal, the ability to become. So young, they had the ability to take and it would be so carelessly easy, wouldn’t it? They were simply parasitic, and they withdrew deeper inwards towards themselves, not trust they wouldn’t take over if an opportunity arose. All they had was their mind, fractured and raw but their own. Until someone convinced them they didn’t have to be a parasite without a cause and isn’t that all that matters? To help others, even if their power in its very nature was invasive, insidious, monstrous. 

 

They call them Azarias, buried beneath different forms, protecting themselves by using others, those who volunteered or had left nothing but a husk shell to slip into. Regardless of the form they take, indiscriminately the doll’s eyes will turn, each uniquely guarded with haunting shades of storms and ice belting together in a perpetual battle for dominance. They burnt, people who were saved claimed, a cleansing of the soul. It would be simple if humanity was a shell he could sink into, or even if a single doll was born empty. It wasn’t. It is fraught, all their fragilities, neuroses and connections, dolls were and are still humans.  
They were changing but not by the means that mattered, they were enmeshed and blended with countless names and imaginings that became as much as their own as the people they had inhabited. The minuscule sense of self he nurtured was through distance when he disconnected all he could do was count the time down that they were still themselves and nothing has marked them, and nothing ever will. A cold comfort but a comfort all the same. They huddle beneath a thin sheet, their own fingertips clenching into the threadbare fabric. His eyes flicker within the depths of their dreams, perspire dripping downwards until the cotton beneath them takes a darker, wettened shade.

 

Fragments of many falling loose until all of that remained were mirror shards staring back into an empty marionette. No fingers to hold on themselves, nowhere to move but downwards, the fragments form into a loose pile. Then tighter, the glassed shards crush each other almost intimately grinding into each other until a fine dust settles beneath the dolls feet. A woman’s silhouette waits in the distance, only from shadows she waits. She does not speak but a scream is heard from a bundle she clutches, blood soak down her bladed hands. Threaded blood drips down and there was nothing they could do, the doll remains motionless and they remain nothing beneath, forgotten and listless all the same. Only when they threaten to wake, the dust blows away revealing her to him. Mother, featureless and smooth but her in the crevices of the womb. Mother, her clawed fingers the small package a breath away from the giant maw she for a torso. Mother, Mother, Mother;

 

“Come home,” she pleads but they cannot respond, least of all scream.

 

They would try to refuse the call, throwing themselves bodily into the consciousness of others battering bodies until they were long past their use. They murdered but not only those who were considered villains but those they controlled. Anything to mask the increasing call of the mother. It mattered little. She followed everywhere, always in their consciousness, drawing closer and closer. Until they broke in the living world, permeating every action they did, endlessly watching till all they could do was break, turn into the dust of who they truly were. “A facility so you can get better,” their former boss clutches their shoulder gloved and sterile even if they no longer needed it to know. They felt it. Their handler feared them, they wanted to shove them in the closet like a used up, broken toy. Only Mother dared to draw near. They close their eyes and took in the waiting tempest of accepting their fate.

 

They awake outside, the streets brushed over with chilling raw air that he takes in raggedly in bursts. Their body was compelled, unlike where they controlled, their feet guided them through the empty streets, far desolate than any reckoning could cause. Onwards they move, their feet bare and uncertain but they carry onwards all the same. Every piece of them, those they had picked, those who they took from, those they had stolen most completely, the pittance that was left that was theirs alone, all marched to her call. Even when it felt their pulse burn severely beneath the fragile skin of their default form, heartbeat burning in their eardrums, even when they felt they should retreat back into the safety of another’s flesh. They felt the pulse of her heart on the shackled door, and it matched the beat of their very own. 

 

The scent, foul and wretched immediately overtakes their body. Soon after the putridity of the scent enters through him he is released from the invisible strings that brought there as if a spell had been broken. Blinking back tears from oncoming nausea, their stomach churns with their breath shallowly rising and falling in an attempt to lessen the stench. Only when their eyes adjust from the gentle frostbitten blues to the living muteness of darkness do they realise the true horrors waiting. Pitter-pattering of unnerved fear becomes full-blown as corpses lay scattered across the hardened ground. Mother waits in the middle no longer cradling the bundle as it lays strewn on the floor, surrounded by death.

 

There were no cries, no blood and that struck greater fear in their chest as they lurch onwards to reach them and know why it mattered that they cried and bleed no more. 

 

Even when their body warred to flee, screams echoing in their mind, they navigate across, steps placed cautiously between the fetid coiling mess beneath them. More and more becomes revealed as they draw nearer to the centre, unable to turn away as familiar eyes of each of their victims stared accusingly at them. Yet it reminded them of the glass from the first dream, but the only illusion was their death, no they were all inside, threatening to bludgeon the last of the defences down but they won’t allow them to, not until they speak to Mother. They finally reach the centre, and it took the last remnants of their strength to not collapse to the waiting unforgiving ground. Their tears threaten to spill as they open the bundle and see the emptiness, the unformed being waiting for them.

“You didn’t come home,” Mother whispers gently, their voice chilling all the same to the distraught vigilante.

 

They knew the moment they had seen them with the dripping bundle in her arms, and they ran. The horror of living without a soulmate was bearable if you believed that no one was there, that you were alone. It was infinitely worse to know you abandoned them and lived. They could do little even now, but they carefully pick their soulmate from below and clutched them to their heart. They died, and they didn’t go home with them. Mothers chest breathes out the foul air directly onto their back intoning lovingly; 

“He was so lonely without you, so cold. I found them as a wee baby stuck in the snow in the middle of a war. Even when you didn’t know what you done, you always made them little playmates. You bought them with your clever mind. All these pretty dolls to play with.”

Mother gestures out to the field of corpses who appeared to have shifted to look at them her voice taking an angered tone;

“Not the same he would cry. Not the same, not the same, not the same.” 

 

Her body moved with a lack of comfortability, their hair flung over their featureless head. All they could do was breathe tightly, their body shaking tightly even with the warmth of Mother’s breath upon them. She continues onwards with her onslaught of words the bodies creeping closer to the trio in the middle. Until finally the one known as Azarias breaks her barrage;

“Let me come home, please,” he begs, each word more despairing and heartbroken than the last.

“Too late, too late, too late but,” she now laughs and begins to claw at their hair, scarcely a touch more before skin would break; “you can go back to when it wasn’t too late.”

“Tell me how.” 

“Eat.”

 

How do they know what she means when she speaks, how could they trust so easily? They had no answer to how they felt but they knew, they always knew deep, deep down. They could trust mother. They open their mouth and _consume_.

 

In daylight of the hospital, employees looked on in terror before they spilt into the room. The one codenamed Azaria's body was wracked with seizures, blood pouring from their pores, covering him completely. There were those who tried to stop it, pouring more blood in but it was too little, it was as if they were being drained. Until all that was left was to watch before it ended with a time of death. Even more frightening was the smile, gleeful and full of joy it seemed. They noted it down to muscle spasming but as the handler noted with horror shaking her. They had finally been touched with a tattoo upon their death.

 

In a shape of a morning star.

 

Mother watches with a hum of pleasure, tendrils of brain matter coating her teeth as she leans over them to begin her feast. Dust turns to bleeding water, they leave behind their future to a river flowing into the past. In a room, images play in their sleep they watch the world of a lost boy. One whose empathy not unalike their own. 

 

They wake to a warmly lit room, bodies moving frantically around them. The place echoed not only of tendrils of ghosts but the sheer reality. They were indeed in the past, but it was beyond their own imaging it would go back this far. They inhaled and narrowed their eyes in concentration as they searched the confines of his mind. No longer the warm bath but a barely turned on faucet dripping down into their, no, his, consciousness. 

 

They are Will Graham and they are investigating a murder.

**Author's Note:**

> Coming up next: Episode One
> 
> Let me know if you think of a tag to add because I have no clue. Save me.
> 
> Don't bite too hard! Blood is for the second date ~


End file.
